Tag Archives: Autonomous Automobilty

Late last year, I attended the Ford Applink Hackathon in Melbourne to gain a broader understanding of how the design and development of on board operating systems is impacting on the Australian car manufacturing industry. It was also a chance to see upfront how theses systems work and to chat with some of the individuals responsible for the ‘cool’ apps and interfaces that are emerging in current model cars.

The concept of a hackathon is to get a whole lot of developers together in one location, provide a selection of tasty treats, energy drinks, and access to the backdoor (usually an API or SDK) of a particular database. In this instance, developers were invited to extened the possibilities of the Applink operating system, which is set to roll-out in many new models in the coming year.

Ford is hoping that Applink will become the standard operating system across all automobiles in the near future – great for developers who will only have to learn one system and build tools for the one platform. However, one ‘ring to rule them all’ might, as you would expect, provide political and economical challenges for participating car manufacturers.

Thanks must also go to the Ford team particularly Martin Gunsberg for all of his help over the two days. Also thanks to Two Ton Max for hosting this event.

Below is a video grab of the event and some insight into how the Applink system works. More importantly, the video highlights where our research can contribute in the grey areas of legislation surrounding communication within automobiles.